Random Acts of Unkindness

by Jacqueline Ward

  Colin had still gone on, married Lizzie and become her kids’ dad. Ken Little had gone on, getting a long service medal and retiring to Kent; that’s what his replacement told me. She’d gone on, even in prison. Even he’d been talking to the press and making a bloody drama out of it all. My life had just stopped. It might have looked like I’d carried on with my life, but inside I was dead. Stone dead.

  That’s when I started to drive up to Saddleworth Moor. I wasn’t sure if he was up there, but it was my best chance of talking to her. I’d heard that she was going up there, to show the police where other people were buried. There was a kind of deep excitement inside my chest when I realised that there was a chance they might find him.

  At first I drove to the bottom of the moor, but the police were there and they had it all cordoned off. So I drove up to the car park near a farm and walked over to a wall. I jumped over and went onto the moor for the first time. To me, it was a big graveyard.

  I’d never been here before, although I’d wanted to. I wasn’t even sure why. Yet when I stepped onto the grim scrub at the edge, and saw the bright purple foxgloves growing out of it, I felt like I had come home. I’d gone down to the spot where there were yellow markers, death placers, so that when they did bring her here they would all know where to look.

  Although she would know where to look already, because it was she who had committed the crime and drawn them all here. I suddenly felt a pang of anger at her, a deep anxiety at all the attention she was getting, and wondered if it was a busman’s holiday for her, just a way for her to feel the sun on her face as she stood on another grave.

  I stood at the designated spot and looked around. It was different, but not all that unpleasant. A kind of dumbed down version of the world, all amethyst and grey, with some bright greens here and there. And birds everywhere. I looked it up later on in Thomas’s encyclopaedia.

  ‘Many of these moorland species are considered to be in danger or vulnerable. Variations in the habitat suit different species. The red grouse, merlin, short-eared owl, and hen harrier nest among the taller heather, where the plant growth provides them with cover.

  In contrast, the golden plover, lapwing, and curlew are often found nesting on the recently burned open areas. Wading birds such as snipe and redshank, as well as duck, nest in the wetter areas. Moorland is also an important feeding area for the Peregrine. Many of the birds which nest on the moor winter in this country, returning to the another life for half the year.’

  Two lives. A bit like me. There was a covering of emerald green moss, with heather outcrops here and there. I imagined that if they had brought Thomas here, he would be resting in a warm bed underneath the blanket of moss pulled up around him, the heather duvet keeping him safe and happy in his resting place.

  His pillow would be a puffball mushroom and his sleep would be undisturbed here, where it was ever so quiet. The roots would grow around him, drawing him into the ground and he’d eventually become a living part of it, turning in the peat with all the other living creatures that were down there.

  What’s more, I could visit him every day, sure that he was here, safe in Mother Nature’s arms. I suddenly felt glad that he hadn’t been disturbed, not like the other poor children. I couldn’t even imagine what their families had gone through when their little kiddies had been dug from the moor and taken back into the horrors of life they had been left with.

  I’d never forgotten the faces of the policemen involved in the investigation, the sorrow drawn all over their faces. I’d intentionally not contacted the families of the children who had been found there, because I was never really sure that Thomas was dead.

  What if, on the day I made contact, told them what I thought, shared their grief, he walked back in? They didn’t have that luxury. Their children were gone. But then again, they didn’t have my torture.

  The road was blocked off at both ends on the day they took her to the moor. I sat at the top of Pots and Pans and watched the helicopter land. I couldn’t see what went on, but, like at the trial, I pleaded silently with her to tell me if she had murdered my son.

  She’d confessed to the murders by now, and between them they’d named five children altogether. Three had been found, one at the house on the day, and two buried on the moor. The police started to dig again, and I stood rooted in horror to the spot when I saw the front of the paper.

  They’d found Pauline Reade. The search went on for months, and every day I got as close as I could during the day, waiting for a phone call in the evening to tell me they’d found Thomas.

  I’d considered getting in touch with Mrs Johnson, Keith Bennett’s mother, and I’d sometimes seen her on the moor. Who was I to talk to her? Her son was officially dead, mine was officially missing. She was in the paper, on the telly; I was rolled out at John Connelly’s benefits and appeals.

  Not that I was complaining, I just felt sidelined, as if I wasn’t good enough to go over it again and again. Her child had been named, she was on the way to knowing what happened. Mine was completely invisible still.

  This might sound like all I was worried about was myself, but I was actually devastated. I’d been walking on the spot that poor girl was found just before they started digging, and it was driving me mad.

  The problem was, I knew how the families felt, I knew their every emotion, I knew their torture, how every day they still thought about their child. Those children would have been in their thirties now, with families of their own. Jobs, houses, lives.

  All of them gone, like Thomas. I was hysterical when the body was found, and hysterical when they didn’t find the other body and closed the investigation. If there had been any hope left in me, it died that day.

  I sat on the wall and watched them move the digging equipment down the path. I wanted to shout at them to take it back, find her son, find my son, but I had no voice left. I just watched with sad eyes. It was my fifty-ninth birthday, but people had forgotten about my birthday a long time ago.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I stare through the house and out of the back window, where, as if to reinforce Bessy’s story, two blackbirds sat on the windowsill. As if to tell me that this is real. This is what you’ve been waiting for. I want to read more but I’m angry. I need to think it through and take action.

  John Connelly. Mr Connelly Snr. Pat Haywood told me he’d organized and funded Mothers for the Missing. He was a local philanthropist and benefactor. But all the while he was making sure that all the families of the missing boys completely believed that their sons had been abducted or, like the boys last month, had committed suicide.

  That their disappearance had gone almost unpublicised, pushed to the back of the local paper, runaways or young suicides.

  The case notes say that Little was removed from the case. He clearly found out about John Connelly. To make things worse, John Connelly had used the Moors Murders to cover up his tracks making the mothers believe that their sons were buried on Saddleworth Moor. And who were they to question it? Like his son, John Connelly was head of a criminal hierarchy, making sure that there were enough people below him to take the blame if anything went wrong. Like Harry Pearson, who was probably on the take as well.

  These influential men were using their self-made standing in the community to prey on victims from the same community. Ingratiating themselves and diverting suspicion by throwing money at it. Connelly Snr. paying Bessy and probably others, encouraging her to get involved with his campaigns, and Connelly Jnr. providing Pat and the other victims’ families with facilities to meet.

  It’s almost unbelievable, but it fits in with everything I’ve suspected about Connelly. And now Connelly Snr. He’d been buying up all the houses in the area from the mothers of the missing children, then manipulating them to believe that those kids were runaways. Bessy, anyway, and probably the other poor families in the photos at the community centre.

  I open the file again. John Connelly is mentioned several times in Thomas’s investigation, m
ainly in a positive sense, as if he is some kind of mass benefactor.

  For a second I question my motives and wonder if Bessy’s story is true, and if Thomas really is buried on the moor with the other victims. I know that, at the time, searches were limited to digging small spots in a vast area and there is a strong possibility his body wouldn’t have been found at the time. But even if he is, where are all the other boys? I turn to the back of the file and tucked into the back flap of the folder, out of sight, is a handwritten letter.

  It’s from Inspector Little. It’s his letter of resignation. Mostly that he is disappointed that leads were not followed up, that the number of missing children and teenagers from the area has substantially increased and that there should be an urgent enquiry into Thomas Swain’s case. That it should be reopened. That Bessy should be reinterviewed and Colin should be told about Connelly’s meddling in Bessy’s life, making her a spokeswoman for his campaign when there was never any proof that Thomas was a victim of the Moors Murders, or any other murder.

  Even though she hadn’t recorded it in her notebook, Bessy had talked to Inspector Little about it, urged him to dig for Thomas and when he had pointed out that there was no proof she had become confused, telling him John Connelly had made her think there was. I was beginning to see a fuller story, one where Bessy had been more desperate then even her tragic story told, not knowing who to believe and begging for help. Poor Inspector Little resigned because he knew the truth and no one would listen to him.

  Pinned to his letter was a photograph. At first it looks like it was the same photograph I had seen at the community centre, of John Connelly and Bessy outside the Gables. But then I see that Bessy is standing on the other side of Connelly and there are two other women beside her. I look more closely, back through the decades, and I see it. Behind Bessy is a telegraph pole and, dangling over the heads of the women, is a row of scarves and pairs of shoes slung over. Three mothers, three scarves, three pairs of shoes.

  It’s dark now and I can’t put the lights on. I push all the papers and the exercise book back into the folder and go outside into the yard. Bessy’s yard is really a garden, complete with an army of bird feeders.

  I go in her shed and find some grain. As I step outside, there’s already a huge amount of birds on the telegraph wires and on the top of the shed, all twittering away. As I put the grain in they make a swoop for it, filling the yard with flapping wings and beady eyes. Bessy’s friends, the blackbirds, hang back, sitting on the washing line and watching the greedy starlings.

  I put the seed back and steer my bike out of the yard, pushing the file into the storage box at the back. I’m not so concerned about getting seen now. I ride up the main roads, looking upward at the cameras, taking my time in the evening traffic.

  I ride through Northlands and take a right at the end, up toward the hills and away from the city. The road out of there narrows and splits, a fork where both ways lead to tragedy.

  One way leads up to the moor, several miles on. I’ve been up there several times, not with work, but to gawp like the other five or six rubberneckers who are there every time I go up there. I toy with the idea of riding there now, giving myself more time to think before I embark on my next move. But the other road leads to John Connelly’s derelict old factory, where I’d seen Bessy standing outside on the photographs.

  I sit at the crossroads and laugh. Let’s face it. I’m fucked. Jim Stewart warned me that if I carried on searching for Aiden on police time I’d be suspended. Then I’d probably have to resign. I wondered how many other coppers had resigned after suspecting the truth. Even now, it seems too big to comprehend.

  Why would Connelly and his father before him be abducting kids? And why would some of them turn up as apparent suicides? It doesn’t make sense, except in the most horrible and grotesque of scenarios.

  When Aiden went missing, and after I had recovered a little from the terrible shock, I spent an enormous amount of time wondering what he was doing, how he was eating if he hadn’t touched his bank account.

  I pictured him selling the Big Issue in London, eating out of bins. God knows I’m used to seeing kids living on the street in Manchester, waiting outside McDonald’s and eating the half-eaten cast-offs of other people.

  Like Bessy’s birds, swooping in for a discarded burger or milkshake, waiting just on the eye-line of passers-by, hoping they’d decide that the sandwich they’d just bitten into was horrible and bin it. Watching people eat through fast food restaurant windows, rooting in skips after the supermarkets close.

  How was he washing? How was he going to the loo? How was he cleaning his lovely teeth, brushing his hair? How, how, how? If he was alive, like they all said he was, and he’d run away, how was he doing all this?

  I’d been thinking about it, a constant train of thought behind the classical conditioned reactions of driving, as I sped along the main roads early one morning. I remember it clearly; it was one of those early autumn days where the sunlight trickles through the darkened leaves.

  Kicking the leaves with Aiden. Running through them and burying ourselves in the rusty piles. Picking up acorns and planting them the next year. Pressing the leaves in Aiden’s books. I must look for those leaves. Leaves that he had touched, suddenly so precious.

  Then, out of nowhere, it hit me. I don’t know why, but the unspeakable came to me. He must have been getting money. He must have been working. What could he have been doing at fifteen? No, sixteen. Working. For money.

  There was a screech and I almost hit the car in front of me. I sat there at a busy road junction, horns beeping all around me. Working. For money. For who? Doing what? No. No. No.

  I sat there for a good ten minutes, until a police car arrived. Then I pretended that my car had stalled and it wouldn’t start so I had no choice but to block the road. I’d caused a backlog of nearly a mile by this time, but all I could think about was Aiden, my shy little boy, being forced to do unthinkable things.

  What if he was being held against his will and abused? He must be. Either that, or he was dead. Because he’d never just run. Never. I knew him. He’d never do that.

  I remember snapping out of it and starting my engine.

  ‘Thanks, officer. It’s fine now. Sorry about that.’

  A mile and a half tailback, apparently, but I hadn’t cared. I was frozen in a frame of realization, one that I would never escape. I remember pulling over just further up the road and putting my head on the steering wheel to try to appease the physical pain I felt at my son going through that. Going through something I had fought to save him from. Protect him.

  I remember clearly thinking that this must be the worst pain in the world, apart from identifying his body. What’s more, other people were probably thinking it. Before I even considered any harm coming to him, people would be silently wondering if he was part of some sordid sex ring, one where young men and women were abducted and forced to submit to perverts and paedophiles, living on a basic level, like an animal. And if they objected they were punished. Or worse.

  I was completely amazed and sickened that I hadn’t considered this before. I was completely incensed that everyone around me had remained silent. It was so obvious now, the sad looks, the quiet nods whenever I wondered out loud where he was. They must have thought I was stupid.

  Was it a mother’s built in defence system? Was it a way to save a mother from the crippling pain of her child suffering? I’d broken bad news to mothers for over a decade now.

  I’d stood in a pristine lounge with Mike, heads bowed, as we delivered various grades of horrendous. Your son’s in custody for committing petty crime. Your daughter’s been arrested for assault. Your son’s been detained over a suspected rape. Your son’s been arrested on suspicion of murder. Your daughter is dead.

  We usually get ‘It’s not her. She wouldn’t do that.’ Or ‘No. You’re wrong. I know my son. He wouldn’t do that.’ As the case progresses and guilt becomes clear, the crumbling of the parent is
visible. Sometimes it’s emotional; tiny teardrops leaking out at first, followed by howling and keening. Or physical. Actual collapse.

  One woman became so ill that she was admitted to the hospital. I’d had to visit her to tell her that her son had been found guilty of manslaughter. I’d asked the nurse if they had found out what was wrong with her.

  ‘No. We can’t find anything. Except that she’s so weak that she can’t stand. No previous medical conditions. She just keeps saying that she’s in great pain.’

  I’d frowned at the nurse, and shook my head.

  ‘What do you think?’

  She’d pulled me into a side corridor.

  ‘I used to work on an old people’s ward. Oldies coming in, weak as kittens. No diagnosis, no real sickness, just pain and weakness. The first thing we’d check was if they’d just lost their partner. One of them even told me that his wife had taken his soul with her when he died. I think she meant his heart.’

  I’d sniggered at the time. Dying of a broken heart. Oh pleez. That’s just stupid, illogical claptrap. But now it was me.

  As I sit here at the crossroads, wondering what to do, I’m hurting. I’ve made some terrible decisions. Taking the money, taking the file, leaving the archive room, going to see Pat Haywood . . . all these things seem crazy on the face of it but each of them put snippet of duct tape over my heart, pulling it together and stopping me creasing with the ever-growing pain and realisation about what was happening to Aiden.

  Like I did at the hospital, everyone around me was sniggering, wondering when I will man up and stop moping. After all, how bad can it be? He’s obviously run away, hasn’t he, because no one’s found his body? So, Jan, what’s wrong? Why are you crying? Why are you crumbling? Why are you doing everything you can to find him?

  No one can feel what I’m going through, because no one else is Aiden’s mum. Even Sal doesn’t seem so concerned; he’s taking it in stride.